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Investigators Are Looking at Governor About Firing

DENVER — In unveiling Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as Senator John McCain’s running mate, the campaign is portraying her as a champion of ethics reform for taking on members of her own party whom she saw as beholden to special interests.

But just a few weeks ago she became the subject of a state ethics investigation.

This month, a bipartisan panel of state legislators appointed an independent investigator to look into whether Ms. Palin had fired a top law enforcement official in her administration because he had failed to dismiss a state trooper who was involved in a divorce with Ms. Palin’s sister.

State Senator Hollis S. French II, a Democrat and former prosecutor who is directing the inquiry and picked the independent investigator, said his sense was that the inquiry would probably not turn up a “smoking gun on the governor” but that it “certainly has the possibility of giving her an ethical black eye.”

The questions began in mid-July, shortly after Ms. Palin fired Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner and a former Anchorage police chief. Ms. Palin said she had wanted to take the department in a different direction.

A week later, however, Andrew Halco, a former state legislator who ran against Ms. Palin for governor in 2006, published a lengthy article on his blog highlighting a bitter back-and-forth between members of Ms. Palin’s extended family and the trooper, Mike Wooten. Ms. Palin’s sister, Molly McCann, was divorced from Mr. Wooten in 2005 and was locked in a bitter custody dispute.

An internal police investigation conducted in 2005, prompted by complaints from Ms. McCann and her family, eventually resulted in Mr. Wooten’s being suspended for illegally shooting a moose and using a Taser on his stepson, although most of the complaints were dismissed.

A judge in the couple’s custody case questioned the family’s motives for filing the complaints. “It appears for the world that Ms. McCann and her family have decided to take off for the guy’s livelihood,” the judge said, according to a recording of a hearing.

The McCain campaign issued a statement on Friday saying, “Governor Palin has been fully cooperative in this situation and has nothing to hide.”

The inquiry by the Legislature centers on what Mr. Monegan later described as pressure from members of Ms. Palin’s administration and her husband, Todd, to fire Mr. Wooten. The governor herself also raised the subject of Mr. Wooten with him, Mr. Monegan has said.

Mr. Monegan, who did not return telephone calls on Friday, told The Anchorage Daily News that Mr. Palin had showed him some of the findings of a private detective the family had hired to investigate Mr. Wooten and accused him of a variety of transgressions, including drunken driving and child abuse.

Mr. Palin told the newspaper that Mr. Wooten had made threats against his wife and her family.

As part of her efforts to demonstrate that she welcomed the Legislature’s inquiry, Ms. Palin asked the state’s attorney general to look into the accusations as well. Ms. Palin initially denied there had ever been pressure applied to Mr. Monegan.

This month, however, she released an audio recording of a top aide’s questioning of a police lieutenant about why no action had been taken against Mr. Wooten. Ms. Palin also disclosed there had been more than two dozen inquiries from members of her staff to the public safety department about him, but she said she had played no role in the inquiries.

Excerpts of the audio recording released by the governor showed Frank Bailey, the state’s director of boards and commissions, pushing Lt. Rodney Dial in February about Mr. Wooten.

“Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, ‘Why on earth hasn’t this, why is this guy still representing the department?’ ” Mr. Bailey said to the lieutenant.

Amanda Coyne contributed reporting from Anchorage.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Investigators Are Looking At Governor About Firing. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe